Personal musings on Israel, Jewish matters, history and how they all affect each other

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Blogger Play

Blogger has put up a new feature that allows you to see the images that are being uploaded to all blogs as they're going up, or, as Blogger puts it: a real-time slideshow of photos Blogger users have recently uploaded to their blogs. It's a great snapshot of what people are thinking and posting about, right now!

What you get when you go there is an endless series of basically random images. There must be hundreds of thousands of active blogs that include images, run by people from all nations and all walks of life, excluding only those with no access to the Internet - and there are fewer such people than there used to be. The diversity is effectively infinite. A snapshot of what's preoccupying humans at a given moment. No particular context, no order, no organizing principle. Pictures that people want to show other people.

I'm not much an admirer of post-modernism, but this is essentially the Platonic ideal of post-modernism: and it turns out to be poignant and moving.